NVIDIA today unleashed a graphics card that is sure to whet the appetites of hardcore PC gamers around the world. Unfortunately, the price of entry is so high that only those with massive amounts of disposable income will be likely to take the plunge.

The new GeForce GTX 690 uses dual Kepler GPUs on a single board. Compared to the single-GPU GTX 680, NVIDIA says that performance nearly doubles in most gaming situations. The GTX 690 is of course built on a 28nm process and brings with it 3,072 CUDA cores.

For the truly insane gamers, two GTX 690s can be paired in SLI mode for some quad-core graphics goodness.

"The GTX 690 is truly a work of art -- gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside," doted Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA. "Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they'll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems."

All of this performance comes at a cost, however. The GTX 690 will have an MSRP of $999 when it launches in limited quantities on May 3 -- wider availability will come on May 7.

At that resolution, those 6950s are barely going to be able to play BF3, much less run the game hitting its 60fps cap with everything turned up. Whats with this nonsensical glorification of computer parts? The 6950 is fine but you're not getting good frames at 5760. I doubt that crossfire setup even gets good frames at 2560 in demanding games.

The 690 is overkill for the vast majority of people, but for those who want one for whatever reason at least have a choice. You always hear developers complaining that the average hardware isn't as good as the new cycles. Well, you need new overpowered cards in order to reduce the price on the old cycle and bring more people up to speed.

So how does this negate the newcomer cards? You're not obtaining the FPS cap, you have no AA and you have no AO enabled. You're basically saying that, by reducing the quality, it's playable, which is meaningless. Clearly there is room for these new cards when your system (which is pretty above average) can't max out that resolution.

When it comes to personal preference you can really scrape the bottom in terms of thresholds of quality, especially with client configs, but I don't understand the argument of lowering quality while basically complaining that new cards are coming in and priced accordingly. 680/7970 are both large upgrades. 8 months ago I'd probably be seeing these strings of posts, except with the 5850 overclocked, and complaints that the 6950 was overkill and too expensive. It's a cycle that continues to baffle me.